THE AMBASSADOR'S WIFE (An Inspector Samuel Tay Novel)

by Jake Needham

  The ambassador thought that DeSouza sounded like one of those Americans abroad who habitually took the locals too lightly. That was a common form of American tone deafness, taking anyone who wasn’t American lightly, and he hoped this time that kind of a mistake wasn’t coloring DeSouza’s judgment.

  He asked about the press coverage and DeSouza assured him there had been no press other than the few anonymous lines about a suicide in the Case File column in the Straits Times, but they both knew that wouldn’t last long. Even if the Singaporean police were discreet, and he imagined they would be discreet as all hell about the brutal murder of the American ambassador’s wife in a five-star hotel within the spotless confines of their fairy-tale city, he had no doubt the story would get to the international press quickly enough. Then those bastards would be all over his ass in a New York minute. It was too good a story for anything else to happen.

  The ambassador let his thoughts drift while he examined the almost unnaturally perfect landscaping that bordered the motorway into the city. Lush and well watered, glazed to the color of money, it never failed to catch his attention. Perfectly trimmed carpets of thick grass, banks of red and purple bougainvillea so rich and dense that they threatened to spill out over the road, and perfect lines of identically trimmed trees of exactly equal height as far as the eye could see.

  Sometimes it seemed to him that Singapore wasn’t a city at all, but a replica of a city, something that had been built just yesterday to impress visitors rather than as a habitat for actual human beings. Singapore bore about as much resemblance to the swarming, stinking, impoverished reality of Asia as San Diego did. Asia Light, some people called it. It always made him think of a gigantic movie set someone had built to represent a generic city. He had heard a lot of American television shows were actually filmed in Toronto because Toronto looked like everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Singapore was exactly like that. Everywhere and nowhere all at once.

  Whatever Singapore really was, wherever it really was, it sure as hell was hard for him to think of it as being in Asia. Shoot, sometimes it was hard even for him to think of it as being on Planet Earth.

  DeSouza took the ambassador directly to the residence. He showered and brushed his teeth and then he lay down for a while, but he couldn’t sleep. By five o’clock he gave up trying and got up and took another shower without thinking about it, then he sat in the study drinking coffee and pondering what it was he ought to be doing.

  The study of the ambassador’s residence was a pleasant room where he had always felt at ease. His desk was a huge mahogany table that someone told him had come out of an eighteenth-century Philippine church and in the opposite corner were two deep, red leather chairs. He had spent his very best hours in Singapore sitting alone in one of those chairs, his feet up, Puccini roaring out of the stereo, and a glass of malt whisky in his hand.

  His housekeeper knocked and offered him breakfast, but he sent her away. When he realized the woman might have been hurt by the way he dismissed her, he called her back and apologized and asked for some yogurt and toast. It tasted better than he expected and, almost in spite of himself, he started to feel okay.

  Just before six he picked up the telephone and began making calls. That was one of the perks of being an ambassador. You could call anyone you wanted at six o’clock in the morning and no one would dare say a goddamned word to you about what time it was.

  The thought caused him to speculate for a moment on what Liz’s death might mean to him. Would it push him down a new road entirely, perhaps even end his cushy ride as an ambassador and take him to a place he could not now even imagine? A sudden prick of apprehension ran over his scalp as real and as strong as a jolt of electricity, but then it was gone so suddenly he wondered for a moment if it had ever been there at all.

  His first call was to Marc Reagan, his staff assistant, and his second was to Cally Parks, the Regional Security Officer at the embassy. He told each of them to be at the residence in an hour. He called their cell phones so he didn’t know exactly where they were, but Marc seemed more surprised at the first call than Cally was at the second, which started him wondering if the two of them were together when he called. No, he doubted that. Cally had been at the embassy less than a month. It was her first overseas posting and he doubted she and Marc would have hooked up that quickly. On the other hand, who knew anymore? As nearly as he could tell, all around him people were fucking like bunny rabbits these days. Pretty much anytime the urge hit, they did it. He had missed out on all that, damn it to hell.

  Actually, the more he thought about it, the more he doubted Marc and Cally would have gotten together at all. He had known Marc a while, ever since he had come to work at his firm straight out of law school, and he had watched him grow from a college kid into a…well, what? He couldn’t be absolutely sure about that, he supposed, but he still thought he knew Marc well enough to guess what kind of women would appeal to him.

  Cally was sharp and easy to look at, that was true enough, but she also struck the ambassador as a bit of a toughie, like the girls in school who joined up to play sports with the boys. Maybe she was really like that, or maybe she just thought she had something to prove. Female security officers still weren’t all that common in the State Department so he could imagine how she might feel. Either way, she just didn’t seem to him to be Marc’s type.

  When the housekeeper knocked lightly on the door nearly an hour later and showed both of them into his study, the ambassador was startled to realize he was still musing about Marc and Cally’s sex life.

  “MORNING, sir,” Marc Reagan said.

  “Good morning, Mr. Ambassador,” Cally Parks said.

  The ambassador nodded and waved them toward the two straight chairs in front of his desk.

  “How was the trip, sir?” Marc asked.

  “Okay.”

  “Did you get some sleep last night?”

  “No.”

  Dutifully Marc and Cally both nodded, then fell into silence.

  The ambassador took a deep breath and let it out again.

  “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, now that the small talk portion of our program is over, let me get straight to why you’re here.”

  He folded his arms over his chest and told them what he had just heard from DeSouza, more or less. He watched their faces as he talked. Shock was written all over Marc’s, but Cally’s was blank. Even her eyes were empty. In his experience, it was the eyes that gave people away when they were trying to look cool and they weren’t. Cally just sat there and listened to him, nothing in her eyes, saying nothing at all.

  He pushed the graphic details of Liz’s death a little more than he normally might have, certainly more than the occasion called for, just to see what kind of reaction he would get out of Cally. He got none at all. Maybe this little girl really was as tough as she acted, the ambassador thought to himself. Maybe she really was.

  When he finished, there was a long silence.

  Marc was the first to break it. “Good God, sir, I just don’t know what to say. Mrs. Munson was—”

  “Save it, Marc,” the ambassador interrupted. “What I need to understand now is who else in the embassy knows about this.”

  “No one, as far as I know, sir. I’m flabbergasted. I’ve heard nothing like this from anyone. Not the slightest rumor.”

  The ambassador shifted his eyes to Cally.

  “I’ve heard nothing either, sir,” she said.

  The ambassador grunted.

  “What about the boys in the basement?” he asked. “They know about it yet?”

  Marc glanced involuntarily toward Cally, but she was watching the ambassador intently and didn’t appear to notice.

  The ‘boys in the basement’ was the in-house euphemism for the CIA, a reference to the location of the Agency’s offices within the embassy building. The Agency wasn’t actually in the basement — buildings in Singapore didn’t have basements — but they were on the ground floor at the lowest working
level of the building, hidden behind the grassy embankment that was supposed to protect the structure from explosions and other forms of modern unpleasantness.

  “I doubt it, sir,” Cally said. “Not unless they’ve developed the information on their own.”

  The ambassador considered that, looking out through the big windows in the study into the residence’s gardens. Off in the east, out beyond the treetops, the newly risen sun looked like a flare, washing all the color out of the sky. It was going to be a clear and hot day. Of course, there were really only two possibilities in Singapore. Either clear and hot, or raining and hot. There wasn’t much in between.

  “Marc,” the ambassador said without looking at him, “do you know if Dewey is in town?”

  Dewey Garland was the CIA chief of station in Singapore, an old hand who had circulated through his share of hot spots. The embassy gossip mill had it that Dewey was hiding out there from some kind of bureaucratic indiscretion. Singapore didn’t have much going for it as a post for an intelligence officer, other than obscurity, but when you were on the run from trouble, particularly career-breaking trouble, a post not many people back at Langley ever thought about was exactly the one you wanted.

  “I don’t know, sir. I haven’t seen him in the last few days.”

  “When we’re done here, find out. If he’s in town, I want to see him immediately. If he’s not, set up a secure telephone call to wherever he is as soon as you can.”

  “Right, sir.”

  Another silence settled over the room after that and the ambassador seemed in no hurry to break it. Still facing the windows, focusing somewhere in the distance and seeing things only he knew, he yawned hugely. Then, after a minute or two, he swiveled his chair back toward Marc and Cally.

  “There are two things I have to tell you about all this,” he said, “and both those things are for your ears only. Are we clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” Marc said.

  Cally only nodded.

  “Okay.” The ambassador paused and weighed his words. “First, you need to understand why I don’t appear to be particularly griefstricken. Liz and I haven’t…”

  The ambassador stopped talking and cocked his head as if listening for an echo.

  “I guess that’s the wrong tense, isn’t it? What I mean to say is that Elizabeth and I hadn’t gotten along in a very long time. The truth of it is that we had pretty much come to hate each other for a lot of reasons. You’ve probably heard the gossip already. If it hadn’t been for…well, never mind. Just understand there were several reasons neither Liz nor I could file for divorce without doing more harm to ourselves than to each other. A death in the family was just what we needed to straighten things out. She would have been happy as hell to see me cash in my chips and the truth is I’m not sorry to find out she’s dead either. Under most circumstances, I have no doubt the cops here would be taking a pretty close look at me.”

  The ambassador glanced at Marc with something on his face that was almost but not quite a smile.

  “On the other hand, since I was halfway around the world in Washington when she was killed and have the Secretary of State to vouch for me, I think my alibi will hold up pretty well, don’t you, Marc?”

  Marc looked uncomfortable, but he kept his face blank and his mouth shut. Better not to laugh at a lame joke and be thought stuffy, he figured, than to laugh at something that wasn’t a lame joke and look like a moron.

  “Second,” the ambassador continued, “no matter how nasty you think this is now, it’s worse than that. Everybody thought Elizabeth was just an airhead with big titties who fucked around behind her older husband’s back. If that were true, finding her dead in a hotel room with something shoved up her pussy would be about par for the course.”

  Marc Reagan blanched and looked away in embarrassment. He was used to the blunt, frequently profane way the ambassador expressed himself, but Cally wasn’t and Marc was just old-fashioned enough to be embarrassed when the ambassador talked like that in front of women.

  The ambassador caught Marc’s discomfort and misinterpreted its meaning.

  “Oh, come on, Marc. You’ve heard all the stories about Elizabeth. Half the embassy staff has heard them. Don’t feel like you have to pretend just to be considerate to me. We’re way past that now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Marc glanced back at the ambassador, but still couldn’t quite bring himself to look at Cally.

  “Anyway, that’s not what’s important here,” the ambassador continued.

  He shifted forward in his chair. Knitting his fingers together, he rested his chin on his clasped hands.

  “Here’s the real problem,” he said. “Elizabeth was a NOC.”

  NOC was a State Department acronym for an almost mythological group of deep-cover intelligence officers deployed around the world by the Central Intelligence Agency. Marc shot a quick glance at Cally to see if he might have misunderstood the ambassador. Elizabeth Munson was a deep-cover agent for the CIA? Surely not.

  “Was Mrs. Munson working out of the station here, sir?” Cally asked the ambassador while Marc struggled to contain his shock. Her voice was almost unnaturally calm and professional.

  “No. I think I was the only person in the embassy who knew.”

  “I know this is a sensitive question, Ambassador,” Cally went straight on without hesitating, “but can you give me any idea what Mrs. Munson was working on? The security implications of her murder are my responsibility, and without knowing what she may have been involved with it will be difficult to assess the impact on you or other personnel here.”

  The ambassador pursed his lips and consulted the surface of his desk. When he finally answered Cally’s question, he picked his words with obvious caution.

  “She was developing sources in the Muslim insurgencies in this region. Southern Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines primarily. She had been at it for nearly a year.”

  “Your wife was running agents who were infiltrating terrorist groups?”

  “That’s right,” the ambassador nodded. “Yes.”

  “So this may have been a political assassination,” Cally said. “The assassination of an undercover American intelligence officer by Muslim terrorists.”

  The ambassador sighed heavily and consulted the top of his desk again.

  Marc was taking everything in as fast as he could, but he was having a real problem keeping up. He wouldn’t have been any more perplexed if the ambassador and Cally had suddenly begun speaking in tongues. He had a very hard time imagining the woman he knew as Elizabeth Munson being a CIA agent, let alone one of their deepest cover intelligence officers. He had always thought of Mrs. Munson as the stereotype of a trophy wife. Other than her looks, she didn’t seem to have all that much going for her.

  Employees of the CIA assigned to American embassies came in three flavors. First, there were the official declared employees, Agency people who were identified to the host government and who worked openly in the embassy under their real names and job titles. Second, there were the official cover employees, Agency people who were posted to the embassy in various diplomatic positions. They were all accredited diplomats and all worked diligently at their day jobs, but that was not their primary functions. One of the more interesting games played around every embassy, and Lord knew there were an awful lot of interesting games played around embassies, was called ‘Spot the Spook’. Some of their colleagues knew who the official cover people were and didn’t say. Others said and didn’t know. But no one both knew and said, so the game went on.

  Then there was the third flavor, the real legends, the abominable snowmen, the Loch Ness monsters, the extraterrestrials among us. Those were the NOCs, the acronym for non-official cover employees of the Agency. Generally NOCs were Americans who held ordinary jobs seemingly unconnected with the government. NOCs operated in total secrecy and did whatever they did without the benefit of any embassy support at all. If things went south, that meant they had no diplom
atic immunity. That was what made their cover non-official. The identity of the NOCs was one of the government’s most closely held secrets. The NOCs were the real spies.

  No one Marc knew had ever actually met a NOC, at least not anyone they knew for certain to be a NOC, and he certainly hadn’t. At least not that he was aware of. Up until now that NOCs even existed was something he had just taken on faith, another one of those urban fables like the giant rats that were supposed to be living in the New York sewers. Well, Marc thought to himself, perhaps that was an unfortunate way to look at NOCs.

  But now Art Munson, the American ambassador to the Republic of Singapore, was sitting right there in front of him calmly explaining that his murdered wife, Elizabeth Munson, had been a NOC and that she ran a string of undercover agents infiltrating Muslim terrorist groups in Asia. Marc would have found it easier to believe that Elizabeth Munson had arrived in a spaceship from Sirius and parked it in the embassy garage.

  “Here’s the way we’re going to handle this,” the ambassador continued. “The case belongs to the FBI since it’s a terrorist act against an American abroad so I want Tony DeSouza to run this investigation. You both hear me?”

  Marc and Cally nodded almost in unison.

  “Marc, your number one job from this moment forward is to watch Tony’s back. Make sure nobody end-runs him. Nobody. Not some Washington grandstanders from the Bureau, not some tourists from State, and certainly not those weenies from the Agency. Not anybody. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Cally, your job is to deal with the local cops.”

  “Right, sir,” Cally said.

  “You need to make sure their investigation doesn’t get anywhere near the embassy. We can’t have them suspecting that Liz was anything other than what she appeared to be, the wife of an American ambassador. You and Tony cooperate them to death. Tell them how big and strong and handsome they are. Give ‘em a blow job. Do whatever you have to do. But at all costs, keep the bastards away from Elizabeth’s connection with the Agency. I’m not going to have a bunch of yokels stumbling around my embassy fucking things up.”